Auto-Ethnography, Subversize Discourse, and Fandom
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Western Washington University Western CEDAR WWU Honors Program Senior Projects WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship Spring 2014 A Work in Progress: Auto-Ethnography, Subversize Discourse, and Fandom Sarah Reif Western Washington University Follow this and additional works at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, and the Higher Education Commons Recommended Citation Reif, Sarah, "A Work in Progress: Auto-Ethnography, Subversize Discourse, and Fandom" (2014). WWU Honors Program Senior Projects. 23. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors/23 This Project is brought to you for free and open access by the WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship at Western CEDAR. It has been accepted for inclusion in WWU Honors Program Senior Projects by an authorized administrator of Western CEDAR. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Work in Progress: Auto-Ethnography, Subversive Discourse, and Fandom Sarah Reif Senior Honors Thesis Western Washington University June 10, 2014 Reif 2 Media is important. It informs us, constructs us, and is undeniably involved, whether consciously or unconsciously, in delivering and upholding messages about dominant social ideology. Throughout the history of media studies, scholars have accused media content of a range of evils, from dumbing down the masses to mollifying and controlling them. More recent research however, has turned away from content criticism and instead identifies the importance of the audience as active makers of media meaning. Audience scholars posit that the importance of media lies not with its embedded messages, but instead with what audiences choose to do with those messages. Perhaps the most remarkable example of modern audience-media interaction is that of fans who come together to form communities, or fandoms, around a mutual love of media. Media permeates the social lives of these fans, but does not control them. Indeed, their response to the objects of their fanaticism comes in the form of creative works, interior discourse, and sophisticated criticism. Within this writing I situate the study of fandom within my own personal and academic history. I then provide a review and critique of the claims made by existing fan studies theorists. Finally I will examine examples of politically minded fan discourse and share the results of interviews with members of fandom communities. Ultimately my goals for this paper are twofold—first, to use existing fan theory to reveal how participation in fandom culture and activities provides a space where fans can actively explore and subvert hegemonic patriarchal gendered norms in popular media; and second, to establish that this counter-hegemonic politicization is not an inherent aspect of fandom’s reworking of source texts, but is instead a learned product of continued participation within fan discourse communities Reif 3 STUDYING THE SELF So why do I study fans? The short answer is that I am studying myself. My own roots with the topic lie in a piece of fiction I authored in 2001 when I was ten years old. I had just fallen down the rabbit hole of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and, disappointed that there was no sequel1, decided to take matters into my own hands and write the hobbit Samwise onto a rowboat which would unite the Fellowship in the Undying Lands. It was a masterpiece of modern literature which I surprisingly still possess. Although I had no word for it at the time, my three-page scribbling linked me with many thousands of others asking and answering similar “what ifs” to media of all kinds through the medium of fandom. My own fan fiction writing career never took off but, armed with internet access, I began consuming the fannish works of others in large quantity. Indeed, as I am now in my twenties, fandom has been a central aspect of my identity for the majority of my life. It has ignited friendships, taken up much of my free time, informed my politics, provided a venue to learn new skills, and changed the way I consume media. Most recently, I have begun looking for ways to incorporate this fan identity into my academic identity. For the past three years I have been considering fandom as both a fan and a student of the social sciences by thinking critically of the practices in which I engage on a daily basis. I once had a professor tell me that “all subculture research is really me-search,” meaning that scholars who turn an academic gaze onto a subculture to which they belong are uniquely equipped to provide insight into that community. Therefore I retrospectively look back on the past eleven years as unintentional long-term participant observation. As Busse and Hellekson 1 Many come into fan practices this same way, as I will discuss in my analysis of my interview results. Reif 4 (2006) assert, the only way to be a fan academic is to utilize fannish knowledge and values, specifically “that alternate and competing readings can and must coexist.” and apply an insider’s understandings to academic practices (10). Like other scholars, I have found that previous academic accounts of fandom fail to paint a complete picture of the subculture. Like other fans, I know that it is never possible for a single voice to tell the entire story and acknowledge that I can only hope to add my voice to a growing body of scholastic fan discourse. Thus, I bring the biases of both a fan and an academic to my research. This manifests in an adoration of the topic and the fan community, yet also the critical distance of the academic gaze. In this way, my research as a fan academic is born from the same processes that drive fanwriters and fan artists; the combination of critical distance and emotional proximity to the subject matter that I have as an academic viewing fandom reflects the relationship fans have when viewing the media. The only difference between myself and these authors and artists is that my toolkit for fan participation does not come in the form of creative writing skills or artistic ability; it instead is a result of my education in cultural and media studies. STUDYING THE MEDIA Fandom’s position as a subject fit for academia is a relatively new sub-discipline within a long history of media scholarship and before an accurate understanding of fandom can be reached this history must be understood. Media in all forms has long been the subject of intense scrutiny for its dual role as both the conveyor of information and the enforcer of specific ideology. Media criticism has existed in an official capacity ever since printing presses and the Reif 5 mass populations of Europe’s industrializing cities facilitated the dissemination of information more quickly and freely. Some of the early critics, like Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis who were born from the culture and civilization tradition, were elites who warned that popular media, that is to say: media not proliferated by societal elites, would lead to an overall “dumbing down” of society and an undermining of traditional values. The fears of these elites were rooted in widespread social upheaval in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – increased urbanization resulted in a crowding of urban poor, the industrial revolution brought about mass production which changed the nature of consumption, and democratic uprisings that threatened the existing social structure. Faced with these fundamental changes, early media critics spurned anything that was a product of the “mass” culture, claiming only the aristocracy had the good taste to stave off anarchy. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, media continued to develop and so too did new concerns about the emergence of technology like radio and television that brought media directly into the homes of consumers. This home invasion prompted the rise of the Frankfurt School and fears of a hypodermic model in which media serves the needs of the powerful and injects ideology into a mass population powerless to resist (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944). Still speaking with the privileged voices of social elitism, Frankfurt theorists, like Adorno and Horkheimer, argued that the media of popular culture are infected with a “sameness” which gives consumers an illusion of choice while in reality functioning as a control mechanism wherein “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (1944: 97). They argued that the so-called “art” or media that makes up modern popular culture is a calculated product of a culture industry which replaces innovation or imagination with a “prearranged Reif 6 harmony [that] is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art.” (99). Early branches of media scholarship were most concerned with what they perceived as a failure of content. The Frankfurt School paints a picture of pop culture as heterogeneous low- brow entertainment meant to mollify the masses under a capitalist dominant ideology. This model of media presumes that the audience has no role in interpreting the media they consume and are merely passive recipients. The alarmist view of the Frankfurt School fell under criticism as new schools of thought emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Media theorists like Stuart Hall (1973), one of the founders of the Birmingham School, began to consider media in a more social context. Hall himself was a Jamaican immigrant and his contemporaries ushered in a diversification of the field once dominated by elites. This new breed of media scholar turned the focus of the discipline towards power, inequality, and audience reception. Rather than criticizing the content of media, Hall identified media as an ongoing process and a site of hegemonic struggle wherein the process of media production can only be completed by audience interpretation (Hall 1973).